Sunday, February 8, 2015
My grandmother is 92. No one in our family has lived to that
age. When she was 86, she got really
sick. I began preparing for her death. Most people don’t live into their 90’s. It is happening more and more, but it is not
a tragedy when someone over 85 dies. I
want to be careful with this. I am not
casual about anyone’s death. We read in
1st Corinthians 15 that death is the enemy. It is serious and whenever my grandmother
does die whether is this year or when she is 100, we will grieve. But it is not a tragedy. It is a full life, lived well.
And that would have been true had
she died a few years ago when she was sick at 86. Even so, we prayed for her recovery. Relative in 8 different states were
praying. In our family, Meme is a
revered, saintly figure. And she
recovered.
Did she get well because we prayed
so hard. Maybe. My grandmother was on the wrong medication
and once it was changed, her depression was gone. Her zeal for life, even at 86, returned and
is still there now at 92.
So what do we see? Meme recovered because of everyone’s prayers
or Meme recovered because they finally got the medication right? I don’t even try to know the answer. I believe prayer helped. I know my praying helped draw me to God. God walked with me in a tense, uncertain time. Life is full of tension and uncertainty. If Meme had died, God would have helped me
cope. Someday she will die. When it comes prayer will help us because
prayer is conversation with God and God loves us.
Christ followers live in
prayer. When we are right in our walk
with God, our lives are prayer-filled lives.
If you think, Uh oh, my life is
not prayer-filled, I may not be where I need to be, spiritually speaking,
don’t worry. God is not staring with
arms angrily folded, glaring at us and thinking, you better get this right. God
loves us with mercy and grace. God’s
desire is to walk with us. We are more aware
of God when our lives are built on prayer and immersed in prayer.
In the book Streams of Living Water, Richard Foster writes that the
prayer-filled-life is defined the “steady gaze [or a person’s] soul [is] upon
the God who loves us” (p.49). The stead
gaze of her soul is upon the God who loves her.
The steady gaze of your soul
is upon the God who loves you.
I don’t know about you, but that is
kind of different from the way I normally think and talk. We would suppose Christians – we – are
praying people. But when we say that,
what exactly are we saying? Again,
consider Foster’s quote, “the steady gaze of the soul upon the God who loves
us.” Do you picture an esoteric
aesthetic who retreats to the mountains and sits in silent mediation? Or the monk, cloistered in a cell, chanting
for hours on end? We can imagine the guy
steadily gazing upon the soul of the God who loves him. I can’t see myself being that guy.
I imagine myself and it is a week
before Christmas. Christmas shopping
needs to be done. There is a Christmas
event at church. My older son is singing
in school choir’s performance at Barnes and Noble. My younger son has a basketball game. I need to finish my sermon. We have out-of-town company. And both Candy and I are sick. If someone is tempted to chalk that up to
“Christmas stress,” there are numerous other times in the year that the
schedule is that full. And we know a lot
of people, devoted Christian people, who are as busy as we are. How are supposed to “maintain a steady gaze
upon the God who loves us?” We are so
caught up jumping from one event to the next, we don’t have a steady gaze on
anything.
But it is not just stress that
interrupts us and gets in the way of living the praying life. The problem of evil crops up. I read an
interview just this week touching on this. A British actor, one I thoroughly
enjoy in films, was asked about his atheism.
The interviewer said, ‘what if you died and found there is a God? What would say to him?’ The actor replied, ‘I’d say to God, bone cancer in children. What’s that about?’ He went on to name other dreadfully awful
tragedies. He blamed God for all of it.[i] If there is God, that God is to blame for all
the evil and suffering in the world. The
theological term for this is theodicy; the problem of evil.
It is a reasonable thing to consider
when we talk about prayer. Pondering
evil, how do we pray at all? We think
about the suffering that is in the world and it gets heavy? If we have a heart, we are wearied by the
plight so many people face.
Each of the four gospels offers
examples of Jesus at prayer. In Mark’s
account we see Jesus, right in the midst of a very full life, making space to
gaze upon God. And, Jesus does
surrounded by examples of the pain and suffering that the actor and many
atheists cannot stomach. No one hates
the evil and the hurt humans endure more than Jesus. This is why he came.
In a Sabbath day service with Jesus preaching in the synagogue, a
man interrupts everything. His maniacal
rants make it clear that he is possessed by a demon. Today we see such a thing and chalk it up to
severe mental illness. I believe demons
are real. I believe demons are
real. I believe mental illness is
real. There is no way to determine what
was up with this guy. He came off as
insane as he interrupted Jesus’ sermon with his crazed rants.
Then, the unexpected; the demons recognize
Jesus. “What have you to do with us,
Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to
destroy us? I know who you are, Holy One
of God.” What was this demon
saying? Jesus was the son of Joseph and
Mary, not God.
Jesus sternly called out the demons
and they obeyed. The affair rocked that
little Capernaum synagogue. They had
seen possessions, but never had they witness demons meekly submit to a man’s
authority. This was the carpenter’s son.
Jesus became the talk of the town.
Simon Peter’s mother-in-law had a debilitating fever. Jesus touched her and she was back to full
health.
Word spread. There’s
a miracle man at Simon Peter’s house.
Mobs of people descended on this out-of-the hamlet, and Jesus responded
to every need. He and his disciples
walked from village to village, teaching the Kingdom and casting demons out of
people.
Once, a leper came to him. Lepers were supposed to stand at a distance
and shout “unclean” so other would stay away.
One was so desperate, he violated convention and ran right up to kneel
before Jesus. Jesus was “moved with
pity.” He healed the man.
In Mark Jesus was always hurried and
rushed by crowds. The word that
characterizes Mark’s gospel is “immediately.”
Every need was right now. On one occasion, Jesus was so exhausted, he
fell fast asleep in the bow of the boat.
Waves lifted the small craft high in the air and then slapped it down
hard on the water again and again. The
12 disciples held on for dear life. I
wonder if the tax collector got seasick.
I doubt he was an experienced sailor.
Jesus, also not a boatman, lay in bow and snoozed away. The only time people gave him any space was
when he was in the middle of the sea in weather not fit for man nor beast. If ever someone did not have time to pause
and cast a steady gaze of the soul upon the God who love us, it was Jesus.
Jesus knew busyness, yet he prayed. His relationship with his Father-God deepened
as he prayed in trying times. Jesus
could not be who he was without prayer.
Mark 1:35: “In the morning, while it was still dark, he got up and went
out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”
He prayed at meals. He prayed
with large crowds in the country side.
While he hung dying the cross, he talked to God. Mark’s gospel shows how normal it was to see
Jesus praying.
As a guest in Simon’s home, he sacrificed sleep, rising pre-dawn
so he could focus on God. Everyone else
was still in bed. He was fully human and
needed sleep as much as anyone. Something
he needed more than sleep was time with his Heavenly Father.
Other times, he went far into the wilderness, leaving crowds
behind. I know I sacrifice prayer time for
tasks, sometimes very necessary things; sometimes not-so-necessary. Jesus sacrificed tasks, and appointments
because prayer took priority. He built
his life around it. He did not fit
prayer into the life he was building.
Everything else came after he had his time with God.
How does this look in your life or mine? In 2015, with all the ways life gets filled,
how do we live the praying life as Jesus lived it?
It begins with the development of our relationship with God. No one can do this for you or for me. We go to God together as a community. Together, we sing. Together we serve. Together we pray. We all have to be in it. There is no surrogate faith. Your mom, my friend, an elder – no one else
can develop your life with God. It is
you and God. It is God and me; we have
to step toward the Father in prayer.
God has stepped toward us.
Jesus came – God in flesh. Jesus
took the penalty of sin upon himself.
With death on the cross and his resurrection, sin no longer comes
between us and God. We repent, he
forgives, and the relationship is right there to be lived.
We are made ready for stressful days through our prayers during
the calm times. We make daily prayer a top
priority. What I offer here are a few
possible ways one might enter the praying life.
It could be every morning. With
that first cup of coffee, you read a few verses, write your thoughts and
prayers in a daily notebook, and then spend at least five minutes in quiet,
talking in your spirit to God and listening in your heart as God speaks to
you.
It could be a quiet meditation.
You make sure every day to arrive at work 5 minutes early, but you don’t
go in right away. You sit in your car
for 5 minutes. Read a passage in the
Bible. Spend quiet moments asking God to prepare you for the day ahead.
Perhaps you have young children.
As the school bus pulls away, you pull out your Bible and set it on your
kitchen table. The next 20 minutes will
be you, God, the word, and your prayer notebook. And nothing else gets that time.
Peter woke up. No
Jesus. Where was he? Peter, Mark says, “Hunted” for Jesus. I don’t know if Jesus was done praying when
Peter found him, but Jesus was ready to go.
When shape our lives so that we get to those desert places alone
God and daily, we linger there. When
those quiet moments become fixed in our lives and prayer is normal for us, then
everything else falls in place. It does
not mean everything is easy or perfect.
It means we are in touch with God.
We sense God’s presence and hear when God speaks. Like Jesus, from our times of prayer, living
the prayer-filled life, we are ready to live the purposes and works God has for
us.
So, copy the master. Carve
out space so that life is filled up with prayer and thus filled up with
God.
AMEN
[i] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/11381589/Watch-Stephen-Fry-brands-God-utterly-utterly-evil.html
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